SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – When there’s a medical emergency deep in the backcountry of Desolation Wilderness, REACH Air Medical Services will land their helicopter at a designated spot, hike in to find their patient, hike the patient back out to the helicopter and provide immediate medical care as they fly to the nearest hospital.

“You go in and you’re the only provider,” Bryan Pond, a flight nurse with REACH, said. “We’re the only medical people that are anywhere nearby or coming.”

REACH Air Medical Services, previously known as CALSTAR, celebrated its 25 year anniversary of providing critical care for remote, mountainous areas around the Lake Tahoe Basin. The anniversary coincides with the official rebrand to REACH and a brand new helicopter courtesy of its parent company.

REACH invited local EMS personnel and community partners to celebrate at the South Lake Tahoe Airport on Wednesday morning where it held a bell-ringing ceremony to honor fallen EMS professionals, showed off the new aircraft during an open house and provided breakfast.

The program has been operating under both REACH and CALSTAR for about eight years since it was acquired by Global Medical Response, the largest integrated medical transportation provider in the country. The name change is largely to consolidate into one brand, said Glenn MacIntyre, program director for several REACH bases in the region.

Whether it’s a crash while offroading on Jeepers Jamboree, a ski accident on the back side of Heavenly or a boating emergency in the middle of the lake, the REACH team shows up ready to provide “ICU-level care,” Pond said.

“We’re basically an emergency room coming to the patient,” Pond said. “We take everything that you see in the hospital and stuff it into an aircraft.”

Pond has been a flight nurse in South Lake Tahoe since CALSTAR established the base 25 years ago. It was the sixth CALSTAR air medical service base in California, he said.

REACH provides two different types of flights: when the crew goes out into the field to retrieve a patient, called a scene flight, and when they transport patients from smaller hospitals that may not have certain specialty care to larger ones that do.

Pond said he’s been a part of hospital transfers for everyone from “high-risk OB to newborns to middle-aged people to geriatric patients.” He’s seen it all.

The new helicopter is also outfitted for carrying buckets to fight fires, program director MacIntyre said, which REACH has never done before but wanted to have the capability for in the future.

Schuyler Collett, a flight nurse who’s been with REACH for four years, said some shifts during the shoulder seasons will pass without receiving a call. Other times it’ll be nonstop. It’s very “feast or famine,” he said.

Collett said there have been times when he has intubated patients five minutes after being woken up for a call, then loaded them in the helicopter for transport to a hospital in Reno. By helicopter, that’s only a 20 minute ride.

And even though REACH is a part of a “bigger narrative” of EMS through its parent company, Collett said the South Lake Tahoe branch is as community-focused as it’s always been since it was established 25 years ago.

“For us, we all live and work in the area, and we care a lot about helping people out just right down the road,” he said.

Carly Heltzel is a reporter for Tahoe Daily Tribune. She is part of the 2026–28 cohort of California Local News Fellows through UC Berkeley. Learn more at https://fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows/.